I'm an associate editor at Forbes, part of the team responsible for our signature issues: The Forbes 400, Global Billionaires and America's Richest Families. As a writer, I cover these wealthy business builders as well as other entrepreneurs. Before Forbes, I also reported on entrepreneurs for Inc. magazine and attended Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Next Twinkie Maker: Will A Mexican Billionaire Family Buy Hostess' Orphaned Brands?

Hostess sweets have tempted the sugar-starved among us for more than eight decades. Now, the company is going out of business. That moves the focus on Hostess’ brands—Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Wonder Bread, Ho Ho’s, to name a few—from the store shelf to the auction block.

It seems quite plausible that the next Twinkie maker could be a Mexican company run by a billionaire family.

Meet Daniel Servitje Montull. He and his family are worth more than $4 billion by our tally. Servitje runs Grupo Bimbo, a publicly traded bakery concern that ranks as the world’s largest bread maker. (Seated close to Servitje: his uncle, Don Roberto, and his father, Lorenzo. Papa Servitje founded Bimbo with three others in 1954.) Daniel Servitje assumed control of Bimbo in 1997, setting the company on a course of rapid growth. This included a battle with Mexico‘s tortilla don; positioning white bread in Latin American markets and careful management of Bimbo’s fleet of white delivery vans. In all, a period of substantial expansion—profits doubled and revenue more than tripled—that also included several flirtations with buying Hostess.

Acquisitions are, indeed, at the very center of Bimbo. It has gobbled up companies, though this was initially confined to South America. Servitje, a thin man with deeply set eyes, worked to extend Bimbo’s reach from Mexico to the tip of South America, in Patagonia. Thereafter, his attention turned north. He bought Mrs. Baird’s Bakeries of Fort Worth, Texas for $200 million shortly before 2000, then Heiner’s. And just last year, Bimbo bought the U.S. bakery business of Sara Lee Co. for $709 million, as well as the Spanish and Portugal portions in a separate transaction.

Today, Bimbo is a $10 billion sales business with $200 million in cash on its balance sheet. By contrast, Bimbo posted $3 billion in sales a decade ago. Annual profits have more than doubled to roughly $400 million. It competes with U.S. companies like Kellogg, Hershey and General Mills, and with privately held operations such as McKee Foods, the maker of Little Debbie’s snacks. (Other Hostess suitors include Flowers Food, according to SunTrust.) Supermarkets already stock Bimbo staples like Entenmann’s and Thomas’ English muffins. And the Sara Lee acquisition significantly suggests that Bimbo’s appetite for U.S. bakeries is hardly satiated.

So, perhaps Twinkies will take their place in Bimbo’s white vans. (A FORBES email to a Grupo Bimbo spokesman was not immediately returned.) Bimbo tried once before to seize Hostess. It teamed up with a Hostess union and an U.S. investment firm, billionaire Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa, to form a competing bid during Hostess’ first trip through bankruptcy in 2007. That eventually fell apart. Bimbo backed out, and Yucaipa went ahead and entered a fruitless offer, valuing Hostess at $580 million. Hostess’ business has gone staler since, the product of unfunded legacy pensions, debt and labor strikes.

But even before 2007, Bimbo seemed sweet on Hostess. In the early 2000s, analysts widely speculated that Bimbo thought Hostess a key ingredient for North American expansion—with Hostess’ delivery routes that penetrated across the country into convenience stores, gas stations and grocery markets. Bimbo publicly stated that it was shopping in 2000, and analysts thought soon-to-be bankrupt Interstate Bakeries—the Hostess parent then facing three straight years of losses—would fall to Bimbo. It didn’t, of course. Interstate eventually wound through bankruptcy, only to wind up back in the same situation less than a decade later.

Today, with a taste still for American companies, Bimbo may just bite.

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Revis is 100% right. This is not a socialist country (yet). People think that companies bail out others for fun, not profit. Profit is wonderful and THE reason for being in business. AL can’t help it. No business sense and a huge feeling of entitlement. Abram is also right, Revis was a little too honest and used the term “idiot” once too often. Maybe Obama will claim Hostess is Too Big To Fail, take them over and ship the jobs to Mexico.

Very interesting, Bimbo is already the largest bakery in the USA, now having an iconic brand will just rule the bakery business as they already do in Mexico and Latin America. This will be the second mexican company that does this, at this scale, the first one was America Movil, owned by Carlos Slim, already the largest pre pay cell phone provider. I don’t remember how big Cemex is in the USA, another mexican company… but what is interesting is that american companies are going bankrupt because they can’t sustain years and years of debt and high costs and mexican companies with a different model, still focused on growth and profit can make it in the market.

Despite the science lab ingredients in Twinkies, baked goods (bread especially) have too short a shelf life to be made in Mexico and then transported all over the US. I envision the most efficient and modern Hostess bakeries will re-open, sans-union, and some buyer is going to get one heckuva return on their investment when all this is said and done.